Archive for February, 2013

Broadcast public relations is a ratings game. Whether it’s Arbitron or Nielsen, the magnitude of audience impressions is what it’s all about. As the public relations world scrambles for the earned placements on television programs, marketing departments and ad agencies have been facing challenges as well with the ever evolving world of electronic and digital media. Audiences that were once streamlined into the four to five major television networks, are now scattered throughout the 500+ cable channels, mobile devices, and a myriad of other digital entertainment streaming. So how can you corral the audience data as the outlets continue to evolve? Well, as reported by Alyssa Rosenburg, Nielsen, the gold standard of viewership impression data, is making changes to address this very issue.

There are a lot of details that have yet to be reported, but this is big: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nielsen, the company that measures the ratings of television shows, is reportedly planning a significant shift in its ratings measurement system that will capture data about television viewing not simply through broadcast, but through streaming. Read More.

According to Piers Fawkes, the founder and editor-in-chief of PSFK, a daily news site that acts as the go-to source of new ideas and inspiration, public relations executives are impeding media by failing to understand the change of process and structure in modern newsrooms. If a PR person takes a member of his staff out of the office for three days on a press trip in the hope that they produce an article on their client, it means they could drop to half the production of content during those three days. That’s 35 articles less on his media outlet because someone went to write one piece on a product/company/project. And PR people want us to do that for free.

As a media owner, he wants to ask PR people to reconsider the jollies, the parties and the press-events. Newspapers and magazines are dying, news sites are failing — and PR people are carrying on in the same way they always have. He thinks many are out of touch with the reality of the way media needs to work today to survive.

Piers says that PR seems to be absorbed with social media monitoring – following all this social chatter from a windowless war-room. Meanwhile, they are ignoring how to evolve their processes so that they can get the story written about in the first place. He advised that PR people need to behave like sales people and jump on planes and get to people’s offices or they need to hold video conferences and other ways to connect.

PR needs to adapt to the way modern media works. The South African conference promoter who wants me to travel for 20 hours should instead run a Google Hangout with PSFK featuring some of the speakers, the awards show PR guy needs to fly the Atlantic and take me through an iPad presentation of the best work during my lunch break, the luxury motor company needs to turn up outside our office with a ride when I’m planning to go home anyway. Read more.

Social media has evolved into a very effective public relations tools and is a valuable asset in every P.R. tool box these days. I love how up-and-coming Republican Senator Mark Rubio used humor to respond to the onslaught of a full-fledged Twitter meme after he awkwardly took a sip of water during his State of the Union response with a #WaterBreak.

Social media is just one of a many number of tools used to get your message out in the digital age, but always remember that at the end of day, broadcast public relations has the most credibility – whether you’re getting TV news from your flat screen, smartphone, or other mobile device.

For those of you who like numbers (and I think we all like numbers in this business of public relations), TechCrunch.com’s staff writer, Gregory Ferenstein, has collected the latest statistics on social media:

I find statistics absolutely delicious. Pew research released fresh stats on what slice of Americans are addicted to all of the various social networks as of December 2012. There are a few big business and cultural implications.

Pinterest has practically caught up with Twitter, with 15 percent and 16 percent of adult U.S. Internet users on each network, respectively. Pinterest, which launched in 2009, has experienced explosive growth, especially with a white, female and affluent user base. Women are five times more likely to use Pinterest (5 percent vs. 25 percent) and almost twice as likely to be white and college-educated. It’s become a magnet for hip urbanites searching for the hottest wedding gowns and apartment decor. Twitter, however, gets a lot more attention, since neither presidential campaigns nor Middle Eastern activists are leveraging style catalogs to rearrange their countries’ political leadership.

There is no longer a minority gap in social media use. The surveyed groups (whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans) hover around 68 percent of total adults. Almost twice as many African-Americans (26 percent) use Twitter as whites (14 percent). The disproportionate African-American use of Twitter has fascinated culture commentators and scholars. One study found that African-Americans in celebrity news strongly predicted their Twitter use. Former web editor of the The Onion, Baratunde Thurston, hypothesized that “there’s a long oral dissing tradition in black communities,” explaining, “Twitter works very naturally with that call-and-response tradition — it’s so short, so economical, and you get an instant signal validating the quality of your contribution.” Read More.

The fire that caused the ship to lose power and drift aimlessly on rough Gulf of Mexico swells was just the beginning. Raw sewage seeped into corridors and cabin ways. Food had to be rationed. There were fears of looting. Not surprisingly, passengers were furious and emotional. Some were reported to be “acting like savages.”

For Carnival and the rest of the cruise line industry, the implications are potentially devastating. The deadly capsizing in January 2012 of the Costa Concordia ship off the coast of Italy still lingers in the public’s mind. About a month later, the Costa Allegra liner suffered a similar engine fire, lost power, and was set adrift in pirate-infested waters in the Indian Ocean. Carnival owns Costa Cruises, and now a third high-profile crisis for Carnival in just over a year threatens to cement the perception among vacationers that cruising might not be worth the risk. Read More

CNN Editor’s note: David Bartlett is a senior vice president of Levick, a crisis and issues management and strategic communications firm based in Washington. He is the author of “Making Your Point” (St. Martin’s Press), a guide to communication strategy and tactics.